Faces
by janya.wrote.nightrose
Summary: I don't see them anymore, Jacob. I don't see their faces." It isn't their faces that matter to Jacob. He's waiting for a seven-year-old woman that he loves, that he's waiting for. He needs her but he can't, and so he finds a temporary substitute. R
1. Chapter 1

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Jacob doesn't see their faces anymore. But he doesn't need to.

Their faces don't matter, he isn't interested in pretty or smart or charming. It could be a hag or a supermodel, for all he cares.

He feels bad about it, afterwards, every time. He's taking advantage, first of all. Jacob's never been the kind of boy who was just after _that sort of thing_, even when he was just a teenager.

And he can't fall in love. He's _in _love. Irrevocably and infinitely and without anyone bothering to ask what he thinks about it beforehand.

And he can't see any of them twice, not even a call the next morning because he's not looking for a relationship, he's looking for a release.

And he can't do anything about it.

And he feels sometimes that he's all but cheating on her, on the one he has to love. This _should _be hers, by rights, and it's cruel of him to go squander it when every part of him, body and soul, is her inalienable possession.

When she was a child, this was never a problem. She didn't need him to want. So he didn't. His lust simply disappeared one day, out of the blue, and he never desired any woman (certainly not her!) since.

But when she's a woman at seven years old, the want comes back, quadrupled for its absence. Every time she smiles, every time she looks at him, every time she touches his cheek to relay even a simple message, he can hardly restrain it.

He feels like a monster for his thoughts. The only thing that gets him through is the knowledge that if he wants her, it's because she wants him to. She is literally in complete and constant command of him—he cannot disobey her, even in wishes she doesn't know she possesses, and he can't even want to.

To quote Leah (it's crudity like this that makes him wish he'd never let her in the pack) "Poor Jake. You go from not being able to get it up at all to trying to fuck any woman that'll stand still long enough."

To that, the only reply he could make was, "Leah, shut up."

But it's true! The constant company of his love, of _a seven-year-old_, has him constantly on the edge.

Most of the time he worships her because she's truly very easy to love and every instinct is screaming at him how precious she is. But sometimes, sometimes he misses his free will.

It's times like this.

The woman beneath him is presumably neither beautiful nor witty, neither intelligent nor kind. He doesn't care. She hopped into bed readily enough with the stranger boy.

Jacob will never know that she fell in love with the desperation in his eyes. But he knows he needs her, at least for this, at least for this moment.

She will never know that he is trying to go one day without a thought that will make her father pinch the bridge of his nose in frustration. But she knows she can give him something no one else wants to ask for.

They aren't lovers. It will last exactly one night. Jacob will wake up on the morning and disappear—she will never see him again.

If he could see how she feels, the desperation in this lonely woman to be needed by someone, by anyone, he would laugh aloud.

He's miserable and alone. She's uselessly in love.

Flip the roles and name her Bella and we've told this story already, haven't we?

He shudders and cries out, wordlessly. He's careful about this. Never once has he said her name, because even if Edward knows he's sneaking out to meet strangers in back alleys he really doesn't need to know he's crying his daughter's name in their beds.

That night, they sleep side by side.

Jacob does not dream. He has carefully cured himself of it, because she may look like a woman but she's still so young, she may be brilliant but she's lacking the life experience to make that sort of choice. She's eight and he's twenty-two and it isn't even legal, and he doesn't intend to hurt her like that, not until she's _sure _she's ready, but that doesn't change the fact that her desire leaves him no choice.

No choice but this.

And there's nothing he could dream of but her, so he's forbidden himself from dreaming at all. The same does not apply to sex, apparently. He still needs, even if he can't have her. He'll have someone else.

The stranger does dream, sporadically. Colors and lights. No substance, like her life. It's emptiness, all emptiness.

It's as simple as the child's dreams were, once, and Jacob would weep if he could see it.

But he can't. He's no mind reader, and she's no Nessie.

And he'll never see that she loves him. He's intentionally blind to that.

And she'll never know what he's waiting for, and he'll never care.

In the morning, she's still asleep when he wakes. He kisses her gently on the forehead. All gentleness and none of the passion that was the only thing that ever bound them together. The action of love sets him free, free to go back to his binding.

She tosses in her sleep and sees the fire of his touch. She'll never feel it again, burning her from the inside out, setting her complacency aflame.

Back at home, Jacob cradles the girl he loves in his arms, just as softly as though she were a baby again.

"I want you," she whispers. "I don't want to wait."

He groans.

He'll go to Seattle tonight, he thinks, or maybe further. California.

Far enough away that it won't follow him, far enough away that he'll never have to remember.

Far enough that he won't have dreams where he tries desperately to remember the face he never really saw.

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	2. Chapter 2

**REVIEW! Well, this was originally a one-shot but some reviewers asked me to continue it. See how much i love reviewers? This is the second chapter out of what will be four. Those who've read _I'll Teach You How to Love _(Me)will recognize Jenny. Yes, it's the same character, yes, these stories take place in the same universe. No, you do not have to read either to understand the other. **

She gives him a name- "Jenny", and a firm handshake, and they get down to business.

That's exactly what this is, for both of them. A businesswoman providing a much-needed service to a paying customer.

"What's your name?" she begins, fully expecting a fake one. After all, he wouldn't want the girlfriend a guy _that _hot has to have finding out where he goes at night.

"Jake Black," he answers, honestly enough that she can see it's the truth. Curiosity consumes her—it's a part of her nature, and she's interested in this boy who doesn't lie.

Her life is a web of untruths, most of them told to herself, and earnestness is refreshing.

"Where ya from, Jake?"  
"La Push."

"You're big," she comments, taking in all seven feet of hulking stranger.

"So're all my friends."

She has a net of wild red hair around the face he can't see, and eyes that are misty in the haze of his vision but quite clear in reality, dark blue the color of midnight.

"Yeah, you actually look kinda familiar."

He shrugs, and she doesn't bother dredging up the memory of his equally hulking friends, one with a little girl on his shoulders and the other's face a mask of awe and love. It's a daydream she keeps private, sheltered with the fragments of life she has left beside this.

She imagines with closed eyes that he comes for her, falls for her, is hers, that this half-remembered prince Charming bestows a fairytale life where she doesn't have to do _this _to eat.

Ambitious, isn't she?

Jacob's mind is somewhere else entirely. This isn't the first time he's had to resort to this. Sometimes he can't seduce anyone, no matter how nonexistent his standards. And he really doesn't have any choice.

Leah asked him once, being rude again just to piss him off, "Why don't you just jack off? Save you the money for a hooker."

He sighed and didn't answer.

He couldn't.

Because if he's alone, then of _course _his mind will go to just one place. He fantasizes about one woman, one _child, _and he can't allow that. Better to be able to know he's with someone, a sort of non-entity that takes the Nessie out of the need.

She casually takes off her clothes. She's surprised that a kid this young doesn't gasp or even seem to pay attention at all to the fact that she's naked, but she's used to controlling any reactions. It's become a way of life for her. No matter what goes on, she shrugs and accepts it.

And gets the job done.

It's a job. It pays the bills. It keeps a roof over her head and something in her stomach and really at this point she's not picky.

Jacob's drowning in the desire. He wants and wants and _wants _and the worst part is that he knows she'd let him, if he would only try. If he'd only let himself touch her, ask her, but for God's sake she's seven years old.

Seven years old. She looks like a woman, an exquisite, incredible, sexy, gorgeous woman. But she _isn't. _And he won't lay a hand on her until she's an adult, because mind and body are one thing, but she simply lacks the life experience to make this choice. She isn't able to choose him yet.

As much as she wants to.

He can't let himself sexualize his relationship with Nessie. It would be so easy to give in, to not wait until she's eighteen (how is he supposed to survive eleven years of this when it gets worse and worse every day?), to simply do what they both want so much.

But he won't. He refuses to. Stubbornly, and loudly, and much to both their disappointment.

Jenny pulls him down on the bed then. It has a blue cover on it, one that reminds him in a distant corner of his mind of the color Alice always makes Bella wear, and then he wonders what kind of sicko thinks about his future mother-in-law's lingerie while visiting a prostitute.

Jacob's not the typical heartbroken type. She can see, with eyes that have judged one too many times, that he's one of _those, _the nice boys who come here when the latest real serious commitment has slipped through their fingers.

Love. What a joke. It's stupid, and it breaks you, and in the end feelings are pretty much useless.

To her, he _looks _like one of them, sure, with the dark sorrow in his eyes, but he doesn't act like a boy just getting over his high school sweetheart. He is ready and rough, his skin strong and burning, and when it's over, he says her name into her hair.

That surprises her. When she picks what they call her, they so rarely bother to remember. The whole point of this is for him to pretend.

But maybe she read him wrong. Maybe he's heartbroken because he's looking for someone to love.

She doesn't care.

The deal's done. She's fulfilled her part and playing psychologist doesn't make it any better.

Jacob hands her the wad of cash and puts his clothes on. She thanks him and jumps in the shower, as is her habit.

In a week, when her knight in shining armor is an unexpected reality, she sees him again. She's introduced to, "my brother, Jacob," and tries not to laugh aloud at the irony.

Another reaction to stifle.

"I like her," he says off-handedly to the new part of her life.

He growls with a jealousy he can't explain.

Jenny never can bring herself to tell him, not when he names her anew and casts her in the part of an angel in his life.

Jacob doesn't bother. How do you say that to your brother? "Oh, and I fucked your imprint a couple weeks ago?"

It's better unsaid, looming between them, another tension amongst too many.

It's not like they were together, after all. There's no feelings, no complications, not really.

No one needs to remember it, not when it shouldn't have had to happened at all.

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	3. Chapter 3

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Leah was a mistake. The others were wrong, but he didn't have a choice. But Leah… that was just stupid.

Because she's still in his pack, and she's still slowly falling for him (he's tried to ignore it all along) and he can't run from her like he ran from the others.

It's like gravity (she always thought that was the stupidest way to describe imprinting because it's instantaneous and inevitable and _huge _and gravity works slowly and sometimes you don't notice it at all), the way she's pulled into him. She doesn't fall for him, she falls to him, until one day she collapses in his arms.

It's the end. She lands there… his desperate need has drawn her in (another familiar situation) and she can't resist it.

The want, the emptiness. And this time he _can _read her mind and he _does _laugh and when she tries to bite him for that scorning of her he gently (so gently) explains.

"I fell for Bella because I fell into the abyss. The nothing in her eyes… like a black hole. I had to fill it somehow. And I tried so damn hard."

"Yeah. Well, you sure didn't. You weren't enough, just like I'm not enough. Deal with it. Move on. Grow up, Jacob Black. You have an _imprint _now, the damn perfect better-than-anything-else-can-ever-be fucking forever love! Why do you need to get validation for the girl you had a _crush _on in high school? Huh? Why do you still care about what she thinks?"

"I don't. I… I care what she thinks because she's my best friend, Leah. Because I, rather unlike you, don't enjoy causing the people I love pain just because they don't love me back."

She growls and leaps at him, phasing as she does so she's a human woman, a _naked _human woman, her hands claws as she pulls at his fur and he has no choice but to change so he doesn't tear her apart (one supernatural mauling is enough for any friendship and it would be so unfair if Emily got the guy and they both got the ruined faces), thus transforming himself into an equally nude human man.

She grins and hisses, "Renesmee."

One word is all it takes to set the fiery longing back in action, with the picture of her perfect face and her soft smile and the curves of her new beautiful body flashing in the phasing flame red of the land behind his eyes.

He mindlessly swipes his hand at her like it's still a brutal paw, but in these bodies it isn't a wolf taking down a threat it's just a man hitting a woman and she smiles again, that desperate smile like she's beating him at a game he didn't know he was playing and the last time he thought that with their shared mind she smiled that smile and said "Life's a damn game, Jacob."

He had no answer, because sometimes he thinks she might be right.

His next move is expected. She's been anticipating it, because she knows Jake, and she knows _men, _and she wants it.

Sure, there's the complication of their friendship and the other emotions she's trying as hard as she can to ward away, but more than that there's lust, on both their parts. Really, he can sense that without the imprint Leah might have been the natural path his after-Bella life would have taken, and she's the one who understands him.

But Leah wants almost as viciously as Jake does. She shares his supernatural longing and she has her own desire. It's been years now, ten years since Sam, and Leah may have become a bitch but she's still got an acceptable level of virtue for modern society—Sam was the first, and the last, and she's sick of this. She's an adult woman and she's allowed to have sex if it strikes her fancy.

It does.

"Jake," she says, "don't go tonight."

"Presenting shut up, an act in three parts. Part one. You're not the boss of me. Part two. I need to. Part three. None of your damn business."

"You don't need to go, Jacob," she murmurs, and puts a hand on his shoulder. If they were wearing clothes, it would be little more than a gesture of friendly solidarity. In their current predicament, he gets it.

"Oh."

It takes him a very short time to give in. He isn't sure he can make it to a city anyway, and he sure doesn't want the Jenny thing to happen again. So he just _does _it.

In the dark, even with their werewolf sight, he looks enough like Sam. Dark eyes and dark skin and dark hair cropped short and rippling muscles, and he's not gentle like her forever love was, but she doesn't really care.

There's her developing feelings for him, and more than that she can lie to herself and she's whispering both names and he doesn't even notice.

Leah looks _nothing _like Nessie, but if he only did this with women who looked like Nessie, he'd be drawing from a very limited pool.

Waist-length bronze curls, sparkling white skin, chocolate brown eyes, impossibly perfect features? Not exactly common traits.

And he's trying to _escape _omnipresent thoughts of her. It's his only hope for making it (nine more years, nine more years, just nine more years). This escape, this life, this fierce reality with its total absence of pretend—it's all that gets him through.

She tries not to dwell on the way his voice sounds on her name, familiar in that he's said it so many times, and yet strange because she had almost fooled herself into expecting that it would be the growl of Sam's.

It wasn't.

One more disappointment, but that's the motif of her lifetime and she's used to it by now.

In the morning Seth finds out, and he's shocked and horrified (they never expected otherwise) and then he pretends it never happened (exactly according to plan) as do they.

Or at least they try.

But there's a predictable awkwardness that clings to their little pack for weeks afterwards. And when Leah sleeps on the ground because she can't bear to walk past Emily's house on her way home, she says two names again, this time in her sleep.

SamJacobSamJacob…

Like he said, a mistake.

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	4. Chapter 4

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"Damn it all. I am not waiting seven more years, Jacob Black."

Renesmee Carlie Cullen is a patient woman. She thinks things over. She weighs every side.

And when she makes up her mine, changing it is like stacking all Earth's grains of sand into a single file line using huge, clumsy werewolf fingers, only twice as hard and six times as frustrating.

He sighs and looks at her. He isn't giving in, either. "_No, _Nessie. Absolutely not. You're too _young._"

She snarls. An actual growl, like she's about to pounce. Her muscles tense to match the expression on her face. "And you're _my _werewolf, Jake. Okay? Fine. I'm not going to make you give in to me. But I'm twenty years old and I am finished with virginity. I'm gonna go do what you do, how about that? I'm sure _someone _will have sex with me."

She flips her hair behind her shoulders, casually, and he moans.

"Ness…"

"I'll do it, Jake. You know I will."

"I know."

And she's telling the truth, the cold, hard truth, nothing more or less. She _would, _wouldn't she?

"Nessie, you're… You were born fourteen years ago. I want to wait until you're twenty-one."

"No, Jacob. You want _me _to wait. You haven't been waiting at all."

The accurate accusation stings, and he flinches as her hand reaches for his face like a slap, the blow doubling with images, thoughts, imaginings—Leah, Jenny, a hundred faceless nameless women.

"I'm sorry, Ness."

"That's not going to stop you from doing it again. And I'm sick of it, Jake. I've lasted exactly as long as I can."

"Your parents—"

"Mom?" she calls, and the pale and beautiful woman appears, pen and paper in hand. Without a word, she scribbles her name on the contract, and then walks away.

The girl hands the paper to Jacob. He takes it and with shaking, watering eyes, scrapes over the words.

"We're… you want to marry me?"

"Of course. How else can I stop the cops from coming down on you for sleeping with a teenager? Sign the paper, Jake."

"But… don't you want to really do this? You know, with the ring and the flowers and the white dress? Alice will never forgive you."

She rolls her eyes and says, "Jake, we'll do it for real some other time. But right now—see, there's the judge's signature, and here's Mom's, and here's mine, and here's the line where you sign."

He wavers as gravity yanks his hand inexorably to the paper (white as snow, pure as the promises he's trying not to break) and he clenches his fist. Almost ink spatters go everywhere.

"Why was Bella here anyway?"

"She has to sign off cause I'm a minor. It was actually pretty easy to get the legal permission, since Mom gave full consent, and actual approval, and you don't _look _that much older than me—you weren't in court, so we showed him a picture. We're allowed to get married, Jake. We don't have to wait. All you have to do is sign."

And still he stalls, breath in each moment pulling him in, reminding him a whirlwind of mistakes he _doesn't _have to make again and again, tomorrow and tomorrow, for seven more years.

He won't survive that self-imposed waiting either, not when the only shackle is his refusal.

But neither will he do this and watch her innocent love for him turn into hate, because she needs other choices. She would be better off living a life untainted by what he thought had to be. He was no good for her.

And then a thought occurs to him.

Her parents.

Bella.

Edward left Bella because of what he is, because he couldn't bear to break her.

But he did, and all the king's horses and all the king's men and one very determined werewolf couldn't put her back together again.

He's not going to do this, not going to shatter her like that.

"Jake, I'm not asking. I'm telling. And I'm not going to wake up one day and realize 'hey, I shouldn't have gotten hitched at fourteen.' I've been an adult for seven years, Jacob Black, and I've been waiting _much _more patiently than you, and I'm sick of it. Sign the paper."

And he does. How is he supposed to resist a direct order like that? It's no easier than defying an Alpha's command (back before he was the one who gave them.)

In fact, that's another ironic reversal. He removed himself from Sam's authority just days before the imprint subverted his will.

He doesn't mind.

He puts pen to paper and scribbles out the words in his rough scratch underneath Nessie's beautiful script and then he throws the paper aside and murmurs, "I love you."

"I love you too."

"Renesmee. You are so beautiful."

She grabs him and jumps up, using the supernatural strength of her legs to propel her tiny body high enough to touch his lips. The second of impact isn't enough, and he catches her and holds her there, and his hands are behind her head, the texture of curls foreign and natural against his hand, the pressure of her lips soft and firm and they are so _sure._

In forever, there will be time enough for passion. This first night they are gentle, each with the other, because it's about love and not about the want that's been choking them from the inside out, and he can't stop kissing her and she can't keep her hands off his chest and his arms and this is heaven or at least perfection.

When he wakes up, the sunlight a dull shimmer on her skin, for the first time he has no regrets.

He may have ruined his happy ending, but it feels like the very opposite- like he's finally captured it.

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